While privacy advocates in the U.S. have filed a formal complaint over research performed by Facebook that they say “purposefully messed with people’s minds,” the reaction in Canada appears far more muted.

The Privacy Commissioner of Canada says it plans to press Facebook for details about its notorious study into the emotions of its users, but spokeswoman Valerie Lawton suggested the inquiry is not a reaction to consumer outcry.

“At this point, no one has filed a complaint with our office about the Facebook research issue,” Lawton said in an email Thursday.

“We are aware of the issue; it raises some questions that we are following up on. We will be contacting Facebook to seek further details related to this research and have been in touch with some of our international counterparts about the matter.”

Facebook allowed researchers at two U.S. universities to manipulate the content that appeared in the news feed of about 700,000 randomly selected users during a week in January 2012.

The data-scientists were trying to collect evidence to prove their thesis that people’s moods could spread like an “emotional contagion” depending on what they were reading.

Privacy groups such as the University of Toronto’s Citizens Lab and OpenMedia said they are not aware of official complaints in Canada following the social media giant’s 2012 study, which critics say was conducted without the knowledge or consent of its users.

In Canada, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, the federal broadcast and telecom regulator, in 2011 extended its regulatory exemption for new media, leaving questions about where a consumer upset with online privacy practices should go to have their concerns heard.

A spokesman for OpenMedia said the best course is to lodge a complaint with the federal privacy commissioner under the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, the federal private sector privacy law.

The Washington, D.C.-based Electronic Privacy Information Center, meanwhile, said on its website that it filed a complaint Thursday with the Federal Trade Commission claiming Facebook broke the law by secretly conducting a “psychological experiment” to gauge whether positive or negative updates in news feeds would sway emotions.

“At the time of the experiment, Facebook did not state that user data would be used for research purposes,” says the complaint by the independent ombudsman. “Facebook also failed to inform users that their personal information would be shared with researchers.”

Jeff Chiu/The Associated Press

U.S. privacy advocates have launched a formal complaint over a controversial Facebook study.

Jeffrey Chester, executive director of another independent U.S. watchdog, the Center for Digital Democracy, said he has also reached out to regulators and is considering filing his own complaint.

Facebook, already facing an investigation from British regulators, is under a settlement agreement with the FTC over privacy issues, but the settlement was reached in August 2012 after the one-week study was conducted.

Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg apologized on Wednesday, saying the study was part of “ongoing research” to test products and was “poorly communicated.”

The experiment has angered Facebook users, who have protested on Facebook and other social media.

On Thursday, the journal that published the Facebook study expressed reservations about the paper.

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences said that as a private company, Facebook had no obligation to adhere to rules on the use of human subjects in the study. But the journal says Facebook’s data collection practices may have violated scientific principles requiring the consent of study subjects.

With files from Star wire services

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